Covenants: Anodize (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 9)

by Terra Whiteman

  Zira turned to look at me, eyes wide with revelation. “The guardians of the gates are being murdered off. That’s why the field is expanding.”

  We absorbed this discovery in silence, staring at the dead Augur in the corner, both of us mildly disgusted by my handiwork. “Why you?” I suddenly asked.

  Zira looked at me, in question.

  “Why did that thing target you?”

  “It didn’t. It’s not a predator; merely a scavenger. I think I made myself a target when I absorbed a shard.”

  Was he implying that he’d dreamt the wagon and sign into reality? Or, whatever pseudo-reality this place held?

  And then I thought of Leid. Was she fighting her shadows, too—all alone and with nothing to mend or defend herself? Suddenly, all the horrors we had just encountered seemed trivial in comparison.

  “Can you still see the thread?” I asked.

  “Yes, but it’s growing fainter.” He pointed beyond the shack, past the clearing and into the adjacent tree line.

  Then we didn’t have much time. “Let’s go.”

  Zira nodded. I imagined he didn’t want to stay here any longer than me.

  Saying nothing else, we walked slowly away from the ruined waystation, all the minacious, unanswered questions left hanging over us like a dense, suffocating sheet. I felt eyes on us, but didn’t dare investigate the sensation until we reached the edge of the clearing. Reluctantly I turned, taking one last surveil of the area.

  And there she was: the woman in the dirty sack and one-eyed mask, standing next to the bonfire, watching our departure. She’d gained additional features—branches that protruded from the sides of her head, crystal trinkets attached by glittery threads, dangling like demented jewelry. The sack ended just above her ankles; her feet were not feet, but animated tree roots, wriggling and interlaced.

  “Qaira?”

  Zira waited for me in the brush.

  “Look,” I whispered.

  But she was gone by the time I’d directed Zira’s attention. He gave me a sympathetic frown. “I believe you saw something, but it’s better you don’t acknowledge anything here. It just gives this place more power over you.”

  With that he disappeared into the cluster of trees. I lingered at the edge of the field, conflicted and confused.

  It appeared that Zira wasn’t the only one being targeted.

  *

  “WITHIN THE DEPTHS OF EVERY MIND, lies a river and bridge; leading to a place with doorways, guarded by monsters.”

  So sung the oldest, Sefedre Six, whenever the door to their chamber block slid open, an echo of footsteps permeating the sterile darkness thereafter. Sefedre’s song was meant to soothe the frightened group, like they should have taken solace in that chilling tale. Camede Second, the littler girl, learned to relate the hymn to an impending hours-long session of pain and fear. How Sefedre always knew what was coming eluded Camede, but she dropped to her knees and prayed whenever the song began. She prayed that they wouldn’t take her this time.

  She prayed to Suzerain, the monster that Sefedre promised would save them. Camede had never seen a monster, but knew Sefedre wouldn’t lie to her, to them.

  “How do you know Suzerain is here with us?” asked Camede once, when a session had taken longer than usual and they’d returned her in a shaking, pitiful mess, covered in injection marks and bruises. The others watched on as Camede curled inward on the chamber floor, sobbing, vomiting and soiling herself. Sefedre had been the only one to scoop her up and hug her hard.

  “Because he comes to me, when I close my eyes and cross into Eschatis. He tells me not to worry, and to tell you not to worry either.”

  “Why do they hurt us?” sobbed Camede.

  “To break us, so that we’ll open Eschatis to them. Never break, little bird. Make a totem, and it will protect you whenever they come.”

  “How do I make a totem?”

  Sefedre giggled, tapping Camede lightly between the eyes. “All your power is here. Little bird, don’t you know you could destroy everything with just an ounce of thought? Think up your totem. Do it tonight. You won’t cry anymore, even when it hurts worse.”

  Camede nodded, wiped her eyes and crawled to a corner where Ande First slept, nestled against the beveling of a cool vent.

  Later she tried what Sefedre had advised, and it wasn’t long before her totem appeared. A tall, thin creature bearing four arms and avian legs. Thorny vines crested around its head, with a pair of eyes set closely together, one the color of silt, the other as black as its flesh.

  Little Bird.

  At first Camede was frightened—surely she couldn’t have imagined something so terrible, but then it knelt before her and kissed her hand. She felt its warmth, warmer even than Sefedre’s embrace. Her mind had whisked her off to a strange place of pillars and crumbling stone slabs.

  Was this Eschatis? Had crossing been so easy?

  She never wanted to leave.

  “What is my name?” her totem whispered soothingly, a stark contrast to its appearance.

  Camede didn’t know.

  “You must name me,” it urged. “I can’t bear your pain without a name.”

  The little girl mulled the creature over, seated cross-legged on a slab of rock. It bowed its head, knelt on the ground before her, still clutching her hand. Camede would remember this moment for the rest of her life, and revisited it whenever things grew unbearable, as they often did.

  “Monster,” she decided.

  Because he was a monster; one this world so greatly deserved.

  As soon as she uttered the name, a strange creature appeared in the sky, obscuring the horizon. It watched their covenant through a single eye, tendrils adrift in windless air.

  For the first time in her life, Camede felt loved.

  VIII

  LEID

  THIS PLACE WAS AN ILLUSION; a web of dreams interlacing—melding, even—with the residents. Even as I thought it, knew it, I could neither believe this, nor the implications it posed.

  We all thought Zira had embellished his experience here, willingly or not, skewed by the trauma he’d suffered from the OSC contract.

  And could you blame us? We were incumbents of the Multiverse and its affairs, an engine of logic and systems, mathematics and reasoning. The Multiverse knew nothing of this, because this wasn’t the Multiverse. It meant there was more to the web of existence than physical reality. The metaphysical, metacognition. It was here, as if one could wish something into existence by merely thinking it.

  And then I thought of attica—;

  The Framers, and their apertures—;

  All the lessers and their varying lore of gods willing life into existence—;

  The implications were too much. Even for me, and I had to stop moving in order to collect my thoughts. Walking and thinking at the same time was too difficult a task.

  Ahead of me, Nibli and the fanged, electric horse-monster had stopped as well. Nara, the wraith had called it.

  “Are you alright?” Nibli asked, as I turned in place and mumbled to myself, trying to regain a semblance of my mental composure.

  “Yes,” I eventually responded. “I’m just having difficulty processing everything.”

  Nibli seemed confused. “Why is that?”

  “Things don’t work like this where I come from.”

  Nibli acknowledged my response with a curt nod. “Lucky for me, I don’t have any preconceived expectations of how the world should work.”

  “Yes, lucky you.”

  I regarded my somewhat-reluctant sentry through an analytical lens. They were towering and thin in frame, ghoulish, with unfathomably-long appendages. Their hair hung to their shoulders, straight and blacker than night, as wispy and ethereal as smoke. Their skin was pale as a corpse—slightly translucent, even—with eyes the color of burning coals. Nibli’s nose was small and barely present, while their mouth compensated for that lacking feature, spanning the width of their entire face.

 
It was still undecided whether Nibli wore clothes, or if the black, reflective armor covering them from collar to feet was organic. I was leaning toward the latter, as the armor seemed to breathe, occasionally releasing plumes of murky brown fog that gave off a psychosomatic effect. Being too close to Nibli made me unreasonably anxious. The tell-tale symptoms of my throat closing and the rat-tat-tat of my heart discouraged a proximity of less than a few feet.

  I referred to Nibli as they, because their design lacked a visible gender. Not even Nibli knew, nor seemed to care, which was totally reasonable.

  The mausoleum-esque landscape continued on for quite a while, and I refrained as best I could from looking at any of the effigies in fear I might recognize one. Nibli was certain I had created this place—a place that had manifested somewhere in my deep subconscious. And I knew they were right; again, I just didn’t want to believe. Not believing was the only thing keeping a steadfast grip on my sanity that, I suspected, this world wanted to pilfer.

  Zira’s skepticism over the plan of Qaira’s venture here resurfaced, then. I knew my husband well enough to bet all caution was thrown to the wind once he’d found out I was here. Qaira was probably here already, and I hoped the statue of him we’d seen at the beginning of our journey wasn’t a dark foretelling.

  Stop it. Worrying isn’t helpful right now.

  It was hard not to let your imagination get the better of you in here.

  A sudden environs-shift punctuated my concerns. Our surroundings rippled, then dissolved like ashes in water.

  Nothingness—a blank canvas—rippled around us a moment more, before new environs took shape. The objects were blurry at first, as if everything was slowly being shaded in with pencil. And then it was real; groups of plateau, disk-shaped rocks stacked atop each other, cairnic in design. There had to be hundreds of them across the otherwise barren terrain.

  Movement in the sky forced my eyes upward. What looked like a giant, somewhat transparent cephalopod hung on the horizon. Even being so high up and so far away, its presence dwarfed ours by a dozen times. It did nothing but float listlessly, watching us with a single eye situated vertically at the center of its bulbous head.

  I fell to my knees, my astonishment manifesting in the form of a loud curse. Even Nibli seemed uneasy with our new surroundings. The horse, unflappable as ever, simply trotted over to the closest cairn and grazed for eroded pebbles. I had yet to learn why this creature was with us. Was it sentient? Was it Nibli’s pet? It needn’t a rein or any sort of instructions to follow, it just did.

  “What is that?” I whispered, marveling up at the sky.

  Nibli frowned. “You’re asking me?”

  “Did you see how everything just changed?” I remarked, excitedly. “Did you see that?”

  “Don’t be too thrilled. From my experience, this means someone else is close by, and everyone I’ve come across hasn’t been very nice.”

  We had crossed the boundaries of someone else’s subconscious. Was the tangible world—sans deranged imaginings—that blank canvas I’d so briefly glimpsed? “Well, I wouldn’t be very nice if I had to live here, either.”

  “Can you fight?” asked Nibli, suddenly.

  I hesitated with a response. It was almost as though Nibli had spoken in an indiscernible language. That was a never a question where I was from; one look at the insignia on my uniform and an interested party knew such inquiries were redundant.

  But here I wasn’t… me. The insignia wasn’t aglow, which meant I wasn’t Vel’Haru.

  To test this assumption, I tried to release a scythe. Nothing happened, only the phantom pain of losing my hand for the gazillionth time. My synesthesia was inactive, as well.

  “No,” I said then, and the weight of knowing I was completely reliant on Nibli crushed my spirit. Zira had already mentioned he was lesser in this place, but the meaning of being a lesser to someone who hadn’t in thousands of years was arbitrary—like a student learning of a complex theory that would never be applicable to them.

  “Then you might want to stay close,” cautioned the wraith. “And stop speaking so loudly.”

  Any closer to Nibli and I’d have to battle suicidal thoughts. “You’re too toxic to walk alongside.”

  “So I’ve been told,” they said. “I thought maybe you were immune.”

  “I’m willing to bet I have a stronger tolerance to you than most, but definitely not immune.”

  Nibli sighed. “Then keep as close as you can.”

  We pressed forward over the novel region, the colossal cephalo-cyclops observing our voyage haphazardly. I braved to walk a pace closer to Nibli, enduring a subsequent, inexplicable wave of sadness, all the while wondering what kind of mind could think up a place like this.

  And then I thought of Nibli, and how lonely their toxic life must have been. I was shocked to feel tears welling up in my eyes, that signature tightness in my chest forcing me to gulp down a sob.

  Nibli sensed my ungoverned grief. They stopped and looked down at me, a glimmer of predation in their eyes. I had to appreciate the wraith’s restraint; Nibli was traveling with a sizzling piece of meat, and somehow they resisted the urge to wolf me down right there and then.

  “Never mind,” said Nibli, turning away with a grimace. “Keep your distance.”

  I sighed in relief, wiping the tears away before they left the rims of my eyes, allowing Nibli to walk further ahead. I studied my hands, still wet. There weren’t any bloodstains. How curious.

  Even more curious was that Nara stayed close by until I started moving again.

  As we ventured deeper into the dreamscape, the chorus of chimes that had only ever served as distant, background noise grew louder, becoming a prominent and quite annoying component of our endeavor. Nibli didn’t seem as bothered by it, and I’d probably feel the same once I managed to acclimate.

  But the atmosphere was taking little bites out of my nerves; the cadence of the chorus and roaring, celestial sky—not to mention the massive, ever-stalwart observer from above—made everything feel like it was peaking. A climax. Crescendo.

  If only I’d had my senses.

  If only I’d have listened to Zira.

  I could die here, couldn’t I?

  Get your shit together, said my mind, in Qaira’s voice.

  Without realizing, I’d slowed in gait, overwhelmed by the sudden barrage of negative thoughts. Nibli watched from beside a squat cairn, shadowing all but their smoldering eyes. When I looked at them, the inexpression on their face switched to mild confusion. They said nothing, however.

  “What?” I demanded.

  Nibli brought a single, clawed extremity to the space beneath their nose, tapping once. The gesture alone raked chills across my stomach. Reluctantly I mimicked the wraith, already knowing what my fingertips would touch.

  Blood, still warm.

  I exhaled, quaking. No, this wasn’t real.

  This isn’t real this isn’t real—

  “Why don’t we rest for a minute?” Nibli suggested gently, and it was then that I realized I’d been thinking aloud.

  “I…” I stammered, trying to pick my wits up from the ground. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t—”

  “It’s fine,” interrupted Nibli. “We’ve been walking for a while. Are you hurt?”

  “Hurt?” I repeated, confused.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  Oh. “No, it’s… don’t worry about it.” The fear had started to bubble into anger; anger at my helplessness, at my inability to do a single, fucking thing to help my situation. This wasn’t me. I didn’t need help, or protection. “I’m not hurt. We can keep going.”

  “I insist,” said Nibli, dismissively. They stepped away from the cairn, revealing a massive fire pit and lonely, circular abode in the distance. “We’ve reached a waystation. Maybe there’s some tea for you to drink.”

  I had absolutely no idea what to do with that information. “… Tea?”

  Nibli began for
the fire. “Come, rest. I’ll tell you what I know.”

  *

  The waystation was more menacing than it appeared from afar. The fire pit crackled blue embers, each pop and hiss hit my ears like a painful warning not to take another step closer.

  It was Nibli’s turn to slow, the halcyon of their demeanor giving way to a tensing of their shoulders and dark frown.

  “Leid, stop,” commanded the wraith.

  I did, but not soon enough to miss the body of a cloaked hominid male, crumpled at the foot of the entrance to the stone abode. His hair was the color of rust, soiled by a black, tarry substance. It also stained the corners of his contorted mouth, having died in mid-scream. He had no eyes; they’d been burned from his head.

  Next to the circular edifice was a pair of pillars, etched with symbols and purposeful striations. A stone arch connected the pillars, and from it hung another body, this one appearing to have been dead far longer than the other. It was wrapped in cinctures and tourniquets, bruised and battered beyond recognition. I couldn’t tell if it’d been a monster or person. Was there any difference in this place?

  Whatever the case, I quickly concluded there would be no resting here.

  “What happened to them?” I called, still heeding Nibli’s command to stay back, internally cursing my uselessness.

  Nibli said nothing, turning in place, billows of the foul, psychosis-inducing vapor spewing from their armor.

  “Wraith, answer me!” I shouted, my hands balling into fists. “What is happening?”

  “Dinner,” chimed Nibli, now immersed completely within the toxic cloud. I could envision their ear-to-ear grin. Not exactly the reaction to mortal danger that I’d expected.

  The air surged with a vicious charge as threads of red plasma striated the environs. I couldn’t see anything around the fire pit, shrouded in Nibli’s effluvia, hearing only the shrrcks and thuds of mysterious weapons colliding, footsteps, parries…